Speakers
From the UK, Christina Toren and Allison James, leading childhood researchers. From the USA, Courtney Cazden and Shirley Brice Heath, in the field of literacy and learning, and Jill Korbin, on child vulnerability and child protection across cultures.
From Australia, Jenny Buckland, on children and the mass media; Steve Zubrick, Sven Silburn, Ann Sanson and Jacqueline Goodnow, leading researchers in child developmental health and wellbeing; Ilan Katz and Dorothy Scott, on welfare and early intervention; Brian Gray and Gillian Wigglesworth in the field of literacy and language acquisition; Gary Robinson on Indigenous childhood and family life; Gordon Briscoe on personal and Indigenous histories of childhood and welfare policy, and many others.
Imagining Childhood: Children, Culture and Community will focus on the diverse experiences of childhood across social and cultural contexts. It will present recent work on children's art, play and imagination and explore their significance for learning and development.
The program will examine key institutions affecting children's growth and development in the area of:
- Child protection and child welfare
- Schooling and childcare
- And critically explore current systems, policy and practice
The Charles Darwin Symposium places a high value on audience feedback and participation. Each day's program will culminate in panel discussions in key areas of research and practice:
- Understanding childhood development, art and imagination
- Early intervention, systems of welfare and the community
- Education
Ms Isabella Adams
Title: Early Childhood Development for Indigenous Children: Influences and Issues
Abstract
This presentation focuses on the influences and issues that shape early childhood development for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. It gives an historical perspective of the early intervention and prevention strategies used for Indigenous children to shape their early childhood development in relation to education, care and health since the 1960's. It reflects on the premises on which these strategies were and/or are based. It assesses the influences of these strategies on the outcomes for Indigenous children in terms of their holistic development and well being. It examines the effectiveness of the strategies in terms of issues such as recognition of Indigenous cultural knowledge and value systems, acknowledgement of the skills and strengths of Indigenous people, and the building of capacity for stronger children, families and communities.
This presentation will be based on Isabella's experience as an educator, administrator, researcher and consultant in the Indigenous early childhood area and her experiences with Indigenous children, families and communities in urban, regional and remote locations across Australia.
Bio
Isabella Adams is an Indigenous Australian who has extensive knowledge and experience of the mainstream and Indigenous education sector from pre-school to tertiary levels in urban, regional and remote locations. Isabella was a pre-school teacher in the Northern Territory and a Superintendent of Early Childhood Education, Manager of Aboriginal Education, and District Superintendent in the Western Australian Department of Education. She has lectured in Aboriginal Early Childhood Education at TAFE and university level, and has undertaken research in these areas. Her qualifications include a Diploma of Teaching, Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Education, and Master of Education. She now works as a private consultant and researcher.
Ms Julie Andrews
Title: Bringing Up Our Children: Aboriginal families in Victoria
Abstract
This paper discusses pilot research on identity construction of Yorta Yorta children from birth to five years of age. The research was conducted in the Victorian town of Shepparton, with three Aboriginal families. A total of eight children were involved in the research. The decision to focus on the children of Yorta Yorta families will be discussed, as will the choice of topic. The paper also describes the field techniques used and the researcher's interaction with the families and children, and outlines the findings of the study.
This session will appeal to those undertaking or considering similar research. It addresses the importance of identity construction for the individual within the Aboriginal community and Aboriginal self-determination of research.
Bio
Julie Andrews is a Yorta Yorta descendent. She is currently a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Victoria. Graduating from La Trobe University as an anthropologist she has over fifteen years experience in Indigenous higher education issues. Julie was instrumental in establishing the Indigenous academic support unit at La Trobe University. She developed the Indigenous Employment Strategy for La Trobe University. She has over ten years experience in training university staff on Indigenous community issues. Julie is also the chairperson of the organising committee for the Hyllus Maris Annual Memorial Lecture at La Trobe University.
Professor Shirley Brice Heath
Title: Youth and the Future of Community and Culture
Abstract
Anthropologists have long expected each generation to sustain for their offspring some fundamental patterns of socialisation from the prior generation. Yet for many population groups, this continuity is either not possible or is broken as a matter of economic and social choices on the part of parents.
Migrant, refugee, and exile groups in many parts of the world have little hope of providing for their young the familial or spatial stability that sits at the core of intergenerational socialisation. But more economically and geographically secure families also leave behind key features of their own upbringing. Predominant among these are play between adults and children, household-based creative projects, and habits of preparing and consuming food. Popular journalism attests almost daily to these and other dramatic changes within families living within post-industrial societies. Few news or feature programs note, however, the dramatic effects these changes have on language socialisation, such that in some families, children and adolescents learn relatively little of their language from interaction with parents and elders. Later language development especially reflects these changes in significant ways that affect education and employment choices.
An overview of family life in post-industrial societies provides the background in this paper for close examination of the interdependence of language socialisation with household and familial organisation of time, space, and ideas of work and leisure. A primary goal of this paper is to point to the general neglect by scholars of later language development and to highlight implications for future citizen participation, academic achievement, and choices of employment for today's children.
Bio
Shirley Brice Heath, currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at La Trobe University, is Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature, Professor of Linguistics, Emerita, Stanford University, and Professor at Large, Brown University. She is a linguistic anthropologist whose research focuses on language socialisation and learning environments created by peer cultures. Her current work centres on learning by close observation and the role of sustained expert interaction in project development with adolescent learners. Her publications include the classic Ways with Words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms (1983, 1996) and more than 100 articles, as well as the award-winning documentary ArtShow.
Dr Gordon Briscoe
Title: From Baldwin Spencer's Protection to New Assimilation: Control of half-caste children, 1911-1952
Abstract
In this study I investigate the 'half-caste' problem. This was both a racial and demographic crisis across Australia. My study focuses on Central Australia and examines the proposition that the 'half-caste problem' was a government program designed to both educate 'half-castes' by creating institutions for teaching and training them as useful labour, and to protect the sensibilities of the small white populations of service and pastoral peoples in Central Australia.
From primary sources I discuss the origins of the 'half-caste problem'; the explosion of the 'half-caste' population; the schools and the race problem; the impact over time on government policies on race, religion and the 'half-caste problem'; and finally, the impact of WWII and its aftermath. I present visual aids and draw the narrative from observation and documentary sources.
Bio
Dr Gordon Briscoe was born in Alice Springs in 1938 in what was called a Native Institution. Both he and his mother were 'Wards of the Northern Territory'. In 1942 he along with his mother were removed to a refugee camp in the Blue Mountains (Mulgoa) for the duration of the European War.
In early 1944 Gordon, and later his brother and mother, were sent back to Alice Springs by the NSW Protection Board but were interned by the military until the end of the Japanese War. Gordon was removed to a Church of England Home at Semaphore, Adelaide and spent eleven years in a church operated home for boys of mixed Aboriginal and other descent until 1956.
He worked briefly as a fireman for the SA Railways and then travelled to England, playing soccer and cricket. He returned in 1964, gained a job with the Canterbury Council in Sydney. He matriculated to the ANU in 1969.
In 1970 he worked for the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs as a Field Officer and then for the Redfern Aboriginal Legal Service. He worked closely with Shirley (Mum Shirl) Smith and Professor Fred Hollows while also gaining a position in the Commonwealth Health Department as Assistant Director on the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program.
Gordon returned to university in 1981 and graduated with BA (Hons hist) in 1986. In 1988, on Aboriginal scholarships, he commenced his MA, completing it in 1991, and commencing his PhD at the Research School of Social Sciences in 1992, graduating in 1997. He was involved in broadening ANU's activities in Student Support, the New Indigenous Studies Institute on ANU campus, and the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, where he now works as a Research Fellow.
Ms Jenny Buckland
Title: Children, Media and the Future
Abstract
The relationship between television and children has come in for a lot of bad press lately. But given that children do watch and enjoy television, what is its potential to make an enduring contribution to their cultural and educational experience? How are children consuming media and how is this changing with new technologies and the digital revolution? What are the future possibilities for children to engage and connect with media and how will this empower them? This talk will argue the benefits of embracing what media can offer children, validating children's enjoyment of media and using it as a springboard to develop their own play, creativity, learning and sense of community.
Bio
Jenny Buckland was appointed CEO of the Australian Children's Television Foundation (ACTF) in July 2002. Formerly a lawyer, Jenny played a key role in establishing the ACTF as one of the most successful international marketers of children's television programs. Today the ACTF's programs sell to more than 100 countries and are seen by 96 million people.
Emeritus Professor Courtney B. Cazden
Title: A Longitudinal Follow-up study of the alumni/ae of a Middle-School Science and Literacy Program
Abstract
One of the best-documented US school reform projects in the 1990's was a middle-school science and literacy program in an inner-city school in Oakland, California, called 'Fostering a Community of Learners' (FCL). The program no longer exists, but during the past year, Marty Rutherford, the FCL teacher for several years, interviewed as many of her former students as she could find. I will summarize the design principles of FCL, describe the enacted curriculum, and then focus on what its alumni/ae, now in their twenties, say about its effects on their subsequent lives.
Bio
Professor Courtney Cazden is a retired professor from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she focused on language and literacy for thirty years. She is now a periodic visiting researcher at the Center for Research on Pedagogy and Practice in Singapore. Her most recent book is the 2nd edition of Classroom Discourse.
Emeritus Professor Frances Christie
Title: Advanced Literacy Development for the Years of Adolescence
Abstract
Literacy in the contemporary world is of a higher order than in the past and children leaving school need considerable literate skills if they are to participate effectively in the community. The sheer volume and variety of literacy now, and the many modes of communication - digital and otherwise - that support it, create a world in which, as it is often said, information is the principal commodity produced. This has important implications for teaching and for pedagogy generally.
Much of the focus in the recent past in research on literacy has been on its teaching and learning in the first years of schooling. There are understandable reasons for this: literacy looms large for young children, and its mastery is often seen as a particular responsibility of the primary school. However, more recent research (eg: Christie, 2002; Derewianka, 2003) reveals that there are significant developmental tasks in achieving control of literacy that are a feature, at the earliest, of late childhood to adolescence, marking the transition from primary to secondary schooling as an important rite of passage. This is because the forms of literate language change with the entry to the curriculum of the secondary school and the expanding nature of the subjects studied. New forms of literate language emerge, used in the expression of generalisation, abstraction, argument and detailed description. The evidence suggests that mastery of these things is a challenge of the secondary school years in particular.
This paper will report on the findings of an ARC study now in progress, reviewing indicators of developmental changes in several school subjects across the secondary school years. It will also suggest possible pedagogies to assist the many students who experience difficult in coming to terms with the literacy of secondary school, and hence of adult life.
Bio
Frances Christie originally trained as a secondary teacher of English and history, and she later taught in primary as well as secondary schools. She worked in a variety of capacities before taking up an academic life, even spending time at the former Northern Territory University in Darwin. She was appointed Foundation Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne in 1994. She is now an Emeritus Professor of that university while also being an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney.
Her major research and teaching interests are in English language and literacy education. She is particularly interested in writing development, the relationship of talk and writing, the teaching of literacy to students across the years of schooling from preparatory to year 12, teaching knowledge about language, and in the development of an educational linguistics.
She has published extensively in all these areas, including writing both textbooks for schools and for teacher education. Recent publications have included: (2000, 2001) (with Anne Soosai) Language and Meaning 1 and 2, Macmillan Education; (2002) Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Functional Perspective, Continuum, London; (2005) Language Education in the Primary Years, UNSW Press, Sydney.
Dr Susan Danby and Associate Professor Ann Farrell
Title: The Child's Place within the Research Consent Process
Abstract
Recent understandings of children and young people have seen their increasing participation in policy action, awareness raising and advocacy. The research enterprise reflects the growing awareness of the child's place within the complex process of gaining and maintaining the child's consent to participate in research. Traditional understandings of children as unable to consent to participation due to developmental immaturity has been challenged by recent work that shows children as competent witnesses of their own experience.
This paper examines the first moments of the research conversation to show how children and researcher collaboratively produce and establish the social order of the research interview. This paper has implications for researchers engaging with children within the research process.
Bio
Dr Susan Danby is a researcher in the Centre for Learning Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. She publishes widely in the areas of qualitative research, childhood studies, helplines, classroom discourse, gender, early childhood education pedagogy, talk and interaction, and children's work and play.
Associate Professor Ann Farrell is a researcher in the Centre for Learning Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. She publishes from her international research in early childhood education and care, research ethics, social capital, sociology of childhood and children and families in the criminal justice system.
Dr Ute Eickelkamp
Title: The Artifice of Play
Abstract
It is natural for children to play, and a child who never plays would be a cause for concern. The experience of playing appears to be a condition for feeling fully alive. But play, in order to be play, requires artifice: props and techniques that transform non-play activity (as well as passivity) into play activity. One such artifice is sand storytelling that girls of all ages play in Australia's Central Deserts.
This paper examines how certain aspects of psychological growth might shape this distinctive technique of mark-making in the sand. The discussion focuses on the dominant theme, the family home. I want to suggest that the girls not only depict a house, but, through the totality of the play situation, also re-create the early relationship to their mother (or other primary caretaker). The original dialogue between infant and mother is thereby revived in the inner life of the girls, and at the same time reoriented towards their own emergent image as mothers. This bi-directional anchoring of the Self consolidates the experience of aliveness.
Bio
Dr Ute Eickelkamp is developing a child-focused research program at Ernabella in central Australia, after therapeutic work with Indigenous children in Australia's north and long-term anthropological research on art, imagination, and creative process in the Western Desert. Her interest is in how children experience social dynamics and how life stages and cultural transformation intersect. As ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School for Social and Policy Research at Charles Darwin University, Ute will be embarking on a study of the social imagination of children at Ernabella, seen through the lens of their symbolic play and image making in the sand. Her academic training was in Germany, at the Free University Berlin and Heidelberg University.
Associate Professor Lyn Fasoli and Ms Bonnie Moss
Title: What Can we Learn from 'Innovative' Child Care Services? Children's services purposes and practices in the NT
Abstract
This presentation will explore the diversity of children's services currently operating in remote and rural Northern Territory as a provocation for the renewal and revitalisation of child care services for young children.
The NT Government, like other governments in Australia, is directing significant public funding to services for young children. These funds have been used primarily for Child Care Centres rather Family Day Care or Out of School Hours Care programs. Urban-based long day care services have developed rapidly within the private sector as well. These services are generally designed for parents who work. As a program model they are becoming much more widely accepted and seen, increasingly, as the appropriate form of service for young children.
The child care centre is a relatively new phenomenon having only operated in the Territory for about 30 years. Nevertheless, it appears that uniformity characterises these kinds of services rather than diversity. For example, there is little difference from one child care centre to the next in the ways programs are organised and delivered, in the designs for buildings and grounds or in program purposes and practices. At the same time, the Territory is entering a new phase related to the care and education of young children in remote and rural areas where this standard model of child care centre is not seen as adequate. A mix of service types is emerging. A strategy to increase access to early years services and that addresses gaps in services is fuelling rapid development of fresh new ways of tackling 'child care'.
Many remote communities are developing 'innovative child care' services for young children, designed to meet a range of specific local needs. These programs provide alternative models of child care from which 'mainstream' child care centres may take inspiration and learn.
Bio
Dr Lyn Fasoli has worked in the field of early childhood for over 30 years, most of them in the Territory. She is an educator, researcher, author and consultant. Her experience as an educator began with her work as a teacher of young children in centre based child care, out of school hours care programs, preschool, early years of school classrooms and a mobile children's service. Lyn teaches courses in children's services and early childhood education in both higher education and VTE. She was the Associate Dean, Teaching and Learning, in the Faculty of Education, Health and Science at the Northern Territory University, now Charles Darwin University, before her recent move to Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, where she is Associate Professor in Indigenous Early Childhood Research. In 2004 Lyn worked with a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers investigating the development and sustainability of remote Indigenous children's services funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation. The 'Both Ways' Children's Services Report (2004) documents this project. She has published, nationally and internationally, many articles for early childhood practitioners and researchers.
Ms Bonnie Moss is an active community worker, university lecturer and social justice advocate. She has worked in a range of community based non-government organisations that work towards making our society a fairer place for all. She is interested in emerging community service programs in rural and remote Australia and particularly how workers juggle the responsibilities of their workplace to deliver services that make a change in people's lives. She is currently the coordinator of the VTE children's services programs at Charles Darwin University and has recently been working with non-government community services in management training. She enjoys working with community groups and learners of all ages, and is inspired by the unique social and cultural environments of the Territory. She has worked at Charles Darwin University for ten years, and has raised her family in Alice Springs and Darwin. She is keenly interested in strengthening the rights of children and engaging communities about the rights of future generations.
Ms Pauline Fietz
Title: Socialisation and the Shaping of Youth Identity at Docker River
Abstract
For young Pitjantjatjara people at Docker River, the meanings of age status categories are undergoing revision, influenced by the increasing consumption of products of popular culture, the attenuation of traditional economic roles, and the introduction of mainstream schooling. The increasing moral panics related to criminality, incarceration and substance abuse have also helped to cast young Aboriginal people in the oppositional moulds of youth culture.
This presentation shows how categorising 'youth' practice may however have limited application for young Pitjanjtatjara people where behaviour is not determined by criterion of age alone. More significantly, experience continues to be shaped by multigenerational structures of socialisation, by the crosscutting dimensions of kin relationality, and by those relevant cultural constructs, which provide the necessary orientations for young people to live their lives.
Bio
Pauline Fietz is an Anthropologist currently conducting 15 months of fieldwork amongst young Pitjantjatjara people living at Kaltukatjara, Docker River, in the far south-western corner of the Northern Territory. Here she runs the youth program and is mostly to be found in the Youth Centre with the many young people, aged from three to 29 years, who constitute over 50% of the population. She has returned to study her PhD with the Australian National University after having spent many years living and working in different parts of Northern Australia, mostly in the field of native title.
Ms Sarah Gibson
Title: Myths of Childhood
Abstract
Our ideas about childhood affect the lives of children and how adults reflect on their own childhood. Filmmaker and Jungian Analyst Sarah Gibson will screen clips from her documentary series Myths of Childhood, which argues that when we separate childhood off as a special time and imbue it with adult nostalgia, we are prevented from seeing the real needs and rights of children. In film clips from Rabbit Proof Fence we encounter a child who does not carry the romantic projection of childhood innocence. Can new representations of the child offer us a way through our contemporary confusion around childhood?
Bio
Sarah Gibson is an experienced documentary filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her three part series Myths of Childhood, screened on ABC TV to critical acclaim. Her latest personal documentary The Hundredth Room (2004), explores the landscape of grief. Sarah is also a Jungian analyst in private practice in Sydney working clinically with adults, with a particular interest in sandplay therapy.
Mr Mick Gooda
Title: The Role of Leadership in Child Protection: The case for intervention
Abstract
TBA
Bio
Michael Gooda, a descendent of the Gangulu people of Central Queensland, is well known in Indigenous affairs throughout Australia, having advocated and represented on behalf of Aboriginal people for the last 25 years. Specifically, Mick's extensive work history has involved the delivery of policy and program development and advocacy in Queensland, Victoria, the ACT and Western Australia, where he was the Manager of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) State office. His most recent position in Government was as the Chief Executive Officer of ATSIC and possibly its last employee.
He is currently the CEO of the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health (CRCAH).
Emeritus Professor Jacqueline J. Goodnow, OAM
Title: Research and Action: Challenges, moves forward, and unfinished tasks
Abstract
Moves between research and action involve several groups: researchers, policy-makers, possible implementers, and the people meant to benefit or change. These often do not 'speak the same language', especially likely when they do not share the same history or culture. To be considered are the nature of differences and some possible ways forward.
Bio
Emeritus Professor Jacqueline Goodnow is a 'life-span' developmental psychologist, based at Macquarie University. She has a particular interest in how social/cultural contexts influence both theory and action: influences ranging from views of development to what we see as problems, goals, reasonable strategies, and ways of relating to one another.
Associate Professor Brian Gray
Title Perspectives on changing the institutional reality of Indigenous education
Abstract
This paper will discuss some fundamental principles for English literacy intervention with marginalized Indigenous learners. The principles underpin a literacy program known variously as 'scaffolding literacy' and 'accelerated literacy'. The program is designed to promote high level engagement with literate text as a starting point for teaching even those students considered unreachable by conventional approaches to literacy teaching. This program has achieved significant success with Indigenous primary and secondary students over the past six years.
The orientation taken towards high level engagement brings the program into conflict with many long established presumptions about the educational needs and capacities of Indigenous learners who seek access to mainstream education. This paper will provide a challenge to those perspectives and will argue that a radical re-evaluation of current practice in Indigenous education is a critical need.
Bio
Brian Gray has a background in the field of Education stretching back over a period of approximately 30 years. For all of this time he has worked on the development of pedagogy for Indigenous and other students who are often marginalised in mainstream classrooms. Following employment as a teacher with the Northern Territory Department of Education, Employment and Training, he has worked in Tertiary Education in the field of literacy education at The Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University) and The University of Canberra. At the University of Canberra he was Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education and Director of the Schools and Community Centre. In this role he initiated and supervised the development of an innovative pedagogy that has demonstrated the ability to produce high-level outcomes with educationally marginalized students across a variety of mainstream and Indigenous settings. He is currently attached to Charles Darwin University as Academic Team Leader for the National Accelerated Literacy Program, an Indigenous literacy education project that has been targeted for funding worth $14.6m over the 2004/2008 period.
Mr Robert Griew
Title: Early Childhood and Prevention: Priorities for the policy response
Abstract
Government agencies have invested heavily in recent years in early childhood and prevention efforts. The promise of early intervention is not, however, delivering definitive results to governments for a range of reasons. In this paper consideration is given to outlining the current policy priorities for government around early intervention and prevention, particularly as they pertain to the Northern Territory. Specifically:
- Joined-up government - The need for more effective whole of government responses and the potential for a more strategic investment in early intervention and prevention
- Holistic service responses - The need to develop policy and practice that is better able to take account of the relationships between different social ills, such as family violence, substance abuse and unemployment
- Innovative service models:
- health and welfare 'one stop shops' in remote communities;
- school-based 'head start' programs for Aboriginal communities;
- exploring professional-community hybrid service models; and
- workforce issues.
Bio
Former Deputy Director General of the NSW Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care, Robert was appointed CEO of the Northern Territory Department of Health and Community Services in January 2003.
Robert's career in health and community services started in Children's Services in the early 1980's. In the Commonwealth Departments of Health and Community Services he also worked across disability, aged care, public health and Aboriginal health.
Robert has strong academic and community sector links and was CEO of the AIDS Council of NSW from 1998 to 2001.
Professor Allison James
Title: Day Care or Early Education? Perspectives on the institutional provision for young children in the UK
Abstract
This paper explores the role that early education plays in the social construction of childhood. Taking the UK as its primary focus, but also drawing cross-cultural comparisons, it asks two fundamental questions. First it explores the relationship between the concepts and institutions of child care and those of early education, asking about the differences that these two concepts have for conceptions of childhood and their institutionalisation in society. Second, the paper questions who benefits from these kinds of provision and what benefits ensue? In sum, what kinds of childhood(s) are being promoted as good for children; good for parents; or good for the state?
Bio
A Professor of Sociology with the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth at the University of Sheffield, Allison James has helped pioneer the development of childhood studies since the 1970s and has published extensively in the sociology and anthropology of children and childhood. Her current interests lie in the cultural politics of childhood and children's health.
Professor Ilan Katz
Title: Social Policy and Early Intervention: Options and evidence
Abstract
This paper will explore the reasons for the enormous growth across the globe in the development of early years interventions over the past decade. Why is it that in most western countries funding for early interventions such as nurse home visiting declined considerably over the 1980s and early 1990s, but has grown exponentially in recent years? What different forms of early intervention are being developed around the world, what are the real policy options, and what is the evidence base for the different types of early intervention? Finally the paper will point to the future and recommend ways in which research evidence can be used to enhance and develop policy and practice in early intervention.
Bio
Professor Ilan Katz is Acting Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Previous to this Ilan has worked as a researcher, policy maker and social work practitioner in the UK. His main research interests have included evaluations of early intervention and family support, child protection, international comparison of child welfare systems, parents with mental health problems, youth justice and race and ethnicity.
Professor Jill Korbin
Title: Child Neglect and Abuse Across Cultures
Abstract
The relationship between culture and child maltreatment is complex, politically charged, and fraught with unresolved issues. A critical challenge in understanding and managing child maltreatment from the vantage point of different cultures is to both encompass cultural diversity and ensure equitable standards of care and well-being for children regardless of their cultural backgrounds.
This presentation will examine the role of culture and context in the definition, etiology, prevention, and remediation of child maltreatment. Child maltreatment across cultures must also be seen in the larger context of stresses and supports for families and societal conditions.
Bio
Professor Jill Korbin, PhD, 1987, UCLA), is Associate Dean, Professor of Anthropology, Co-Director of the Schubert Center for Child Development and Co-Director of the Childhood Studies program at Case Western Reserve University. She has published on culture and child maltreatment, fatal child maltreatment, neighbourhood and child maltreatment, Ohio's Amish population, and childhood studies.
Ms Josephine Lafaele
Title: Indigenous Youth Dreams and Aspirations
Abstract
This presentation will provide a brief overview of the work of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association. CAAMA has been at the forefront of Indigenous media for 25 years, focusing on promoting Indigenous culture, language, and dance. CAAMA is the largest Indigenous owned and operated multimedia organisation in Australia providing support to our Indigenous youth and providing them with a voice in the public arena.
CAAMA provides access for Indigenous youth in remote communities and Alice Springs to radio, music, film and television skills and equipment so they can produce their own works of their dreams and aspirations. By working with youth on multimedia projects we work on their personal development in their transition to adulthood by increasing their self esteem, team work and leadership through workshops, recording and promoting their own skills. This presentation will include a screening of Cuz Congress produced by Indigenous youth from Anzac Hill High School and Gap Youth Centre. And finally three Indigenous girls will perform a CAAMA music project Fusion City.
Bio
Josephine has been involved in CAAMA music projects over the last nine years and is currently the Music Producer Manager for the CAAMA Music Record Label. She has over 15 years experience in the music industry touring New Zealand and Australia as a professional singer songwriter.
In her role with CAAMA Music she is responsible for the development and delivery of a range of music industry training programs/workshops in Central Australia and, to other neighbouring communities in WA, SA and QLD. Josephine is currently identifying ways to present community workshops using a more innovative and educational approach bringing a sustainability and longevity to ensure preservation of language and culture in its recorded form.
Associate Professor Leon Petchkovsky
Title: Watiya: Images of subjectivity in Central Australia
Abstract
This presentation reports results of the author's field research studies of dreams, psychotic process, stream of consciousness, and imagery in art productions in Indigenous people in Central Australia. This iconic/symbolic/imagistic perspective is used to compare and contrast Euro-Australian and Indigenous modes of self-experience. It is also brought to bear on a review of literature on Indigenous Australian child development, child rearing, child 'depth' psychology and its adult correlates, and includes commentaries on the writings of Roheim, Hamilton, Hippler, Gardiner, Morton, and Hiatt.
Art images suggest a self-structure oriented around land, kinship networks, the Tjukurpa, and a phenomenology of 'manifestation' (Yuti).
In psychotic process, imagery of fragmentation and transgression of classificatory kinship networks is salient, as is transpersonal attribution of subjectivity (ultimately to the Tjukurpa).
This stands in marked contrast to Western modes of self-construction and self-experience. The author argues that, in imaginal terms, the Western modes revolve around what one might call a 'messianic' archetype, that of the privileged independent human observer. Some of the implications of this in the field of intercultural relationships are discussed.
Bio
An Associate Professor of Psychiatry with the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Queensland, Leon Petchkovsky trained as a Jungian Analyst as well as in psychiatry. He spent five years in Central Australia working in Indigenous mental health and has published to themes of Indigenous self-perception, and the psychological damage of Australia's 'Stolen Generation'. Since 1997, he has been working as a Senior Consultant for the Gold Coast Hospital and its Mental Health Services. As Director of the GCMHS Psychotherapy Program, he has tried to develop a range of service activities, which include the 'creative' therapies (Art Music Psychodrama), and an Indigenous outreach. He has a special fondness for models of therapy, which can somehow survive the crucible of public sector mental health services delivery.
Dr Barbara Piscitelli
Title: Images of Childhood: By children - about culture and identity
Abstract
Contemporary childhood is often described from an urban viewpoint, so we have a limited and sometimes stereotypic understanding of the lives of children living in remote, isolated and rural areas. This paper focuses on the experiences of children on Darnely (Erub) Island in the northern Torres Strait Islands.
Children's ideas are highlighted throughout by way of their stories and images about life on a small island with strong cultural engagement processes. On Erub, children's cultural and creative lives are supported by an extensive system of elders, parents, peers, teachers and artists. The paper examines the role of social learning as a key driver in both preserving traditions and igniting new artistic practices.
Bio
Dr Barbara Piscitelli is an arts and education consultant based in Brisbane. Her research and advocacy focuses on children's cultural participation in communities, galleries, museums and schools. Barbara is a Director of the Collections Council of Australia and chair of the Queensland Cultural Policy Advisory Committee (CPAC).
Dr Gary Robinson
Title: Vulnerabilities and Child Development: Early intervention and Aboriginal families
Abstract
There are indications that patterns of self-harm are widespread in many Aboriginal communities and that for some populations, suicide has become prevalent at very high rates. Epidemic self-harm reflects the convergence of many influences and the web of meanings around suicide cannot be easily confronted. Expressed in children's play, themes of self harm in part echo early social and emotional learning between child and significant others in family settings and their displacement into the acquisition of styles of interaction among peers. For early intervention, the task is at least in part to understand these patterns of vulnerability in terms of child development and the meanings of developmentally significant parent-child interaction.
This presentation discusses elements of a school-based early intervention strategy conducted by developers at Charles Darwin University in partnership with community organisations, schools and other agencies, aiming to target some of the general antecedents of vulnerability among Aboriginal youth and young adults. It will outline ways of working with families and children to assist parents to become more confident and assertive in dealing with the things that affect their children in family and daily life. It will examine the prospects of extension of the principles of early intervention across remote communities as well as rural and urban settings.
Bio
Gary Robinson is a Senior Research Fellow and Research Theme Leader at Charles Darwin University's School for Social and Policy Research. He is a social anthropologist who has been active in research relating to Aboriginal youth, families and children in the Northern Territory for some twenty years. He has evaluated major health service initiatives and continues with research and publication in the field of health and community services development. He is now engaged with the development of early intervention strategies for remote and urban Aboriginal communities.
Associate Professor Ann Sanson
Title: What can Longitudinal Studies Tell Us About Supporting Children's Social and Emotional Wellbeing?
Abstract
This paper will draw on Australian longitudinal studies to identify some broad themes about children's development, health and wellbeing, and their implications for prevention and intervention.
Despite growing up in a period of overall relative prosperity, there is evidence of static or even increasing rates of problems among children and youth on a number of health, social and emotional indices. The great diversity in children's family lives and social experiences is reflected in unevenly distributed problem outcomes. Further, risk factors range from children's own attributes to aspects of the broader social environment, and children often experience multiple problems simultaneously.
On the positive side, there is evidence of remarkable resilience, with major developmental transition points providing opportunities for change. Protection, like risk, can be located in a number of aspects of their lives. Effective preventive interventions need to take account of all these realities.
Bio
Ann Sanson is a member of the Research Committee of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, and an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Melbourne. As a developmental psychologist, her interests centre around children's development within their ecological context. She has played a central role in the Australian Temperament Project, a large-scale 22-year longitudinal study of children's development, and is Project Director for Growing Up in Australia (the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children), which is following 10,000 children over childhood. She recently spent almost five years at the Australian Institute of Family Studies where she held roles including Deputy Director and Acting Director. She has also held leadership roles in the Australian Psychological Society, including Director of Social Issues and Vice-President.
Professor Dorothy Scott, OAM
Title: Innovation in Early Childhood Education: Tapping the potential for generating social capital at the local level
Abstract
We are in the midst of an exciting transformation of early childhood services in Australia. Practitioners whose traditional role has been primarily focussed on the child, are pioneering approaches to strengthening families and building social capital in local communities. This paper explores what "family centred practice" and "social capital" mean for early childhood education; describes some exemplars of innovative services working with families and communities in new ways; draws out some of their common features; and offers some ideas on how we might tap the full potential of promising models through a process of "innovation-evaluation-dissemination-transplantation".
Bio
Professor Dorothy Scott is the Foundation Chair and Director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection, a new federally funded Centre at the University of South Australia. Her previous positions were Head of the School of Social Work at the University of Melbourne and Executive Director of The Ian Potter Foundation, Australia's largest philanthropic trust, where her ideas about "innovation-evaluation-dissemination-transplantation " were developed. Professor Scott has received the Medal of the Order of Australia and the Centenary Medal for her contribution to developing programs aimed at enhancing maternal and child emotional and social wellbeing.
Professor Sven R. Silburn and Professor Stephen R. Zubrick
Title: The Western Australian Aboriginal Child Health Survey: Are there any policy implications?
Abstract
Results from the Western Australian Aboriginal Child Health Survey provide the first comprehensive analysis of the health, social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal children and young people. The findings illustrate the slow rate of change that is likely to occur unless the drivers of developmental change are understood and acted upon by leaders - Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike - and their communities and agencies.
Without an understanding of the basic characteristics and processes shaping the Australian Aboriginal population, attempts to formulate effective policies for the arrangement of human services and their delivery to individual Aboriginal children and their families will fail. This assertion is extended by explaining the nature of the burden of health, emotional and social difficulties, their prompts, facilitators and constraints, and the drivers of developmental change in populations, communities, families and children. How, with these details in hand, is greater policy relevance and uptake enabled? For whom particularly? In what capacity? And to what end? This presentation poses these questions and addresses them.
Bio
Steve Zubrick holds a professorial appointment in the Curtin Centre for Developmental Health at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research where he is the Head of the Division of Population Science. Trained in psychology, Steve has worked in western Australian hospital and outpatient health and mental health settings for many years before commencing work in 1991 at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research. His research interests include the study of the social determinants of health and mental health in children, systematic studies of youth suicide, and large scale psychosocial survey work in non-Indigenous and Indigenous populations.
Sven Silburn is a professorial fellow and director of the Curtin Centre for Developmental Health at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research. Sven worked as a clinical child psychologist with the WA mental health services before moving to a research career at the Telethon Institute in 1991. He has been actively involved in suicide prevention at the state and national level for many years. Sven has a particular interest in how epidemiological research can be used to inform population-based approaches to the promotion of children's health, capability and wellbeing.
Ms Lisa Stefanoff
Title: 'Snake Dreaming': Stolen Children and the mediation of historical trauma and imagination on screen
Abstract
In 2002 CAAMA Productions and the Alice Springs Gap Youth Centre collaborated with children aged 6-12, their parents, and Central Arrernte women to produce the ultra-low budget eight-minute film 'Snake Dreaming'. The film depicts the children's versions of a stolen generations story that some of them were told by their grandmothers.
The film went on to win Best Short Documentary at the 2002 Outback Youth Film Festival and has since screened internationally. This presentation will show the film and explore the inter-generational inter-cultural projections of the experience of the removals that are objectified in it, looking back through the aesthetics of the work to its social production, its intertextual referentiality, and the questions it asks for critical interpretation.
Bio
Lisa Stefanoff is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology (New York University, Department of Anthropology Program in Culture and Media), and independent photographer, filmmaker and radio producer currently based in Alice Springs. Since 2002 Lisa has worked as an ethnographer and in a variety of documentary and drama production positions with the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association's team of Indigenous filmmakers - 'CAAMA Productions'. During this time she has also worked on several central Australian youth arts projects, a regular arts radio program, and other media projects. She is currently a member of the ArtsNT Arts Grants Board, and is Chair of InCite Youth Arts. Her PhD project explores the production of CAAMA's intercultural audio-visual aesthetics and historical consciousness, especially in relation to the modern spirits of love, death, automobility, and country music animating the life-worlds of Alice Springs.
Lisa's research in central Australia has been sponsored by AIATSIS and the Wenner Gren Foundation.
Professor Christina Toren
Title: Imagining the World that Warrants our Imagination: Fijian children's ideas about their lives as adults
Abstract
How are we to explain the process through which, in the course of making sense of the environing world, children bring themselves into being as makers of history?
This paper explores the way that inter-subjectivity informs Fijian children's imaginations concerning their lives as adults through a comparative analysis of data derived from children's essays collected during two periods of fieldwork (1983 and 2005). Seen through the perspective derived from participant observer fieldwork, these data enable a comparative phenomenological analysis of meaning-making as an historical process in which, throughout their lives, people (in this case, certain Fijian children) make meaning out of meanings made by others and in doing so imagine the world that warrants their imaginations.
Bio
Christina Toren is Professor of Social Anthropology and Psychology at Brunel University UK and the author of numerous papers and two books: Making Sense of Hierarchy: Cognition as social process in Fiji, London School of Economics Monographs, The Athlone Press, 1990 and Mind, Materiality and History. Explorations in Fijian Ethnography, London: Routledge, 1999.
Associate Professor Gillian Wigglesworth and Ms Samantha Disbray
Title: A Longitudinal Study of Language Acquisition in Australian Aboriginal Children in Three Communities
Abstract
In the first part of the paper, we provide an overview of the case studies being conducted in three Aboriginal communities: Kalkaringi and Tennant Creek in Central Australia, and Yackanara in the Kimberley. These studies are longitudinal in nature, and data is collected in each of the three communities from a small group of focus children, who were around the age of two at the beginning of the study. We are looking in particular at the range in language input that these children receive in these multilingual communities where traditional Indigenous languages, Kriol and varieties of English are spoken. We are investigating the variety of the input that the children receive, from interlocutors at different ages.
In the second part of the paper, we provide a more detailed case study of one of the communities (Tennant Creek). This is a dynamic, multilingual language setting where children are exposed to traditional languages, a creolised form of English and other varieties of English, particularly Standard Australian English. The code and style switching they are exposed to and engage in is rich and complex. While younger people these days do not learn to speak the traditional language Warumungu fully, it remains an important part of culture and identity. People draw on this knowledge actively in resourceful and symbolic ways, which will be explored in this presentation.
Bio
Gillian Wigglesworth is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Languages at the University of Melbourne. She has a wide range of research interests, which broadly include both first and second language acquisition, language testing and assessment, and bilingualism. She has published widely in these areas. With Jane Simpson, Gillian is currently working on a longitudinal study investigating the complex language input situation of Australian Aboriginal children in remote communities, and its effect on the children's language acquisition funded through the Australian Research Council (the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project).
Samantha Disbray is a Research Assistant on the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project and a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD focus is on story telling styles and practices in Tennant Creek. She has worked as an adult educator in English language and literacy and vernacular literacy. Samantha worked with the Warumungu community in Tennant Creek as the complier of the Warumungu Picture Dictionary, a learner's dictionary published in 2005 by IAD Press. She lives in Alice Springs.
